On Friday 3 March, the European Commission ordered Italy to recover illegal State aid granted to certain non-commercial entities in the form of a real estate tax exemption.
The decision follows a 2018 judgment by the Court of Justice partially annulling a 2012 Commission decision declaring Italy’s tax exemption incompatible with EU State aid rules.
At the end of 2012, the Commission found that a former exemption from the Italian real estate tax (‘imposta comunale sugli immobili’) for non-commercial entities carrying out certain social activities of an economic nature between 2006 and 2011 was incompatible with EU State aid rules. However, it did not order Italy to recover the illegal aid from the beneficiaries, as the tax and land registry databases did not allow the identification of the beneficiaries. In 2018, the Court of Justice partially annulled the Commission’s decision, ruling that the Commission should have examined whether there were other methods of recovering the aid.
The Commission acknowledges the difficulties faced by the Italian authorities in identifying the beneficiaries of the unlawful aid, but concludes that these difficulties are insufficient to exclude the possibility of at least partial recovery of the aid. Italy could use the data from the submitted declarations (new real estate tax) and supplement them with other declaration methods.
More info: https://aeur.eu/f/5ms (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)